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that was backed up by other demographic studies. 104 Despite such “progress,” however, there

remained a more general sense of frustration that Poles were not replacing Jews at a fast enough rate,

with Jews continuing to constitute the largest urban population. While Poles had flowed into

administrative centers, railroad junctions, and seats of garrisons, even the larger towns of Volhynia

105
remained “much more Jewish than Polish” in respect to their “national character.”

The scholarship of Wiktor Ormicki on the demographics of Polish Jewry, particularly in the

eastern borderlands, also indicated how exclusionary policies that suited the goals of the Polish right

were backed up by academics who had been traditionally associated with the more “inclusive” wing

of Piłsudskiite politics. In his work, which was carried out under the auspices of the IBSN, Ormicki

wrote with “restrained sympathy” for the plight of Polish Jews, while simultaneously supporting the

mass emigration of a group whose demographic dominance in the kresy constituted an “unnatural”

phenomenon that needed to be curbed. 106 It was, he stated, “the Polish element only” (by which he

meant non-Jewish Poles) that should benefit from the newly funded urban and rural settlements in the

eastern borderlands. 107 In contrast to their sympathy for an assimilatory approach toward Orthodox

Slavic populations, scholars like Ormicki increasingly focused on a zero-sum demographic

competition between mutually exclusive groups of Poles and Jews.

The assumption that Jewish identity was fixed also informed the work of the very same

governmental and semi-governmental organizations that attempted to assimilate Orthodox Slavs. By

the mid-to-late 1930s, their reports were already mobilizing the ostensibly rational language of

demographics in support of the argument of right-wing nationalists—that the Jews of the eastern

borderlands constituted a fixed population, one whose “foreignness” and “closed-off” character

104 Krzyżanowski, “Polskie siły społeczne na tle stosunków narodowościowych na Wołyniu,” 11.
105 Cited in Hryciuk, Przemiany narodowościowe, 146.
106 Kenneth B. Moss, “Thinking with Restriction: Immigration Restriction and Polish Jewish accounts of the post-
liberal state, empire, race, and political reason, 1926-39,” East European Jewish Affairs 44, no. 2-3, (2014), 212-
213; Grott, Instytut Badań Spraw Narodowościowych i Komisja Naukowych Badań Ziem Wschodnich, 140-141.
107 Grott, Instytut Badań Spraw Narodowościowych i Komisja Naukowych Badań Ziem Wschodnich, 141.

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